Monday, May 3, 2010

Springing

You know when the cherry and apple trees are in bloom, and it's windy, and the petals fly off, caught in air currents, and float around your head and you feel like you're in a movie? Probably some sticky, gooey, love movie? That's been happening to me a lot lately.

It is spring here, and it has come late. Apparently this is normal. I'm used to rains bringing flowers and leaves as early as March, but it seems like it has only been in the past two weeks that the trees have gone almost immediately from bare branches to canopies of green. This state is beautiful when it is green, almost as lush in the spring and summer seasons as it is stark in the winter.

I spent yesterday outside, barbecuing and swimming (in my dress) in a lake, in a setting that looked like it was pulled directly out of a 19th century novel. This image was irrevocably shattered when one of the guys answered their cell phone.

On the last day of April, at the end of national poetry month, I got onto the bus heading in to campus, and it was sunny and beautiful and I was wearing my heart-shaped sunglasses and feeling warm, and an older man handed me a poem, ripped out from a book he had in his hands. The poem is called "Into the Land of Youth" by Killarney Clary, and I don't know if it's good by MFA standards, but it was a nice thing to be handed on a spring day.

Into the land of youth, westward, to the place of starting again, cities of gold, on the coast of promise--mysterious cure--a mirror's thrown down, and so without luck, without reflection we stop.

We have come to the beginning, the finish of the country, itinerary worn out, facing the surf--what sailors smell as land. We ask detailed questions. None of us can tell, so we tug on each other, "Come. Look."

In this lull, one at the tide line stoops to pick at foam and weeds; another builds a fire. The intended didn't arrive and there is no new plan. As the sun lowers, we face the mountains, consider what we have passed, and fall to dreaming, to scrounging.

I want to traipse into the land of youth, where there is swimming and sun and bbq everyday. Unfortunately, I have 30 blank pages of paper staring at me, judging me. I've got the end of the semester blues.